by Lisa Fay Coutley (Author)
In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships--between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth--and considers their consequences. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end? Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment--whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally--Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to.
Ask me why
window while water under sun is dark
as a closed door. A man's hand erases a girl's thigh. The trees start starving
themselves into everyone's favorite color.
Her darkest room digs itself below her throne. The body knows no
wrong move. The more love, the more.
--Excerpt from "Oubliette"
Author Biography
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether, Errata, In the Carnival of Breathing, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs, and the editor of In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. She is an associate professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.